About Me
Where I Live
I have lived in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada for the majority of my life. "The Soo" as refered to by locals, is a city with a population of approximately 75000-80000 people, located at the hub of the great lakes. We are on the Canada - US border, right across the St. Mary's river from our twin city Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan
My Job
From November 1, 2000 to July 28, 2006 I was employed by Red Hat Canada, Ltd. as a Systems Engineer, where I have worked from home here in Canada. As a member of the X Development Team, a subteam of the Desktop Development Team, I was the primary maintainer of the X Window System, which is the graphical user interface in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora Core - Red Hat's two primary operating system products. In addition to maintaining X, I also maintained a number of other software packages. My 5 and a half year career at Red Hat was a wonderful experience, having watched the company grow from about 200 employees to about 1500 employees during my employment. I retired from Red Hat in July 2006 in order to take a long needed break and persue other interests and hobbies.
My Hobbies
Computer Programming
The main hobby that takes up most of my time when I'm not working, is computer programming. Yes, it's hard to believe that I enjoy doing the same thing I do for work, even when I'm not getting paid.
Guitar / Music
Music has always been a strong interest of mine. When I was 11, Def Leppard, Quiet Riot, and other 80's heavy metal bands were on the radio. One day, while listening to Come on, feel the noise on the radio, and jamming along to it on my tennis racket, I decided that owning a real guitar would probably sound better than playing air guitar on catgut. I got an acoustic guitar for my birthday and then took classical guitar lessons for about 2 months. I didn't really learn a heck of a lot at the time, but that was mainly because I wasn't really into classical music at that age. After the lessons stopped, the guitar sat mostly unused.
Fast forward a few years to the age of 14. One day someone I was with stopped somewhere to visit a friend who happened to have an electric guitar, plugged into an amp. After wailing away for a few minutes, he seen the keen look on my eye, and asked if I'd like to try it out. After one note, I was instantly in love with this wonderful new machine. They almost couldn't pry the thing from my hands when it was time to leave.
Later that year, I begged my parents for an electric guitar for Christmas. They said "no" pretty much without hesitation, and then laughed hysterically for 5 minutes. What a big waste of money it would be, they thought, considering how much use the acoustic guitar received since I got it. I tried to convince them that the electric guitar was what I really wanted in the first place, and that the reason I didn't really go anywhere with the acoustic, is that it wasn't really the same thing. After it seemed like I wasn't getting anywhere, I gave up the battle.
Finally Christmas came, and under the tree was a huge box, which contained to my surprise, my first electric guitar. It was a super cheap crappy one, and came with a super cheap crappy amplifier, but they were mine. From that day forward I drove my parents nuts every single day for about 6 years. The guitar almost never left my hands. I played at least 4 hours a day, every day. I bought various guitar effects pedals, and multitudes of guitar tablature books and magazines, music theory books, and eventually even got interested in classical music as well.
Over the years I have learned how to play most of the music that I enjoy listening to, including most AC/DC, Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Guns 'n Roses, Tragically Hip, Led Zepplin, Deep Purple, Dream Theatre, Joe Satriani, Bach, Paganini, Johnny Winter, and various other Heavy Metal, Rock, Blues, and Classical music. While I no longer play the guitar every single day, and haven't done so for several years, I pick up the guitar at least once every week or two and hammer away for a while to keep up my chops. I've been playing guitar for 19 years now (as of 2005), and I look forward to playing for at least another 19.
Electronics
When I was in grade 5 of public school, one day our teacher had a box full of junk, of which each of us was to pick out a couple of items to create a project with using our imagination. I picked a hinge and an old buzzer which turned out to be the old recess bell. Using a 12 volt lantern battery, a couple sticks of wood, the hinge, and the buzzer a couplep pulleys, some string, and a few other misc pieces of junk found around the house, I created a small hand cranked crane, with the buzzer acting as the sound of its engine. While the whole thing was quite lame, this first opportunity of playing with electricity sparked my interest in electronics.
After that, it was impossible for my parents to stop me from ripping apart radios, and other gizmos in the house to try to figure out how they worked. By trial and error, I figured out how a number of things worked, and was able to repair certain things when they broke. Later, I started making creating my own mad scientist experiments, usually involving electronic toys I had gotten for Christmas.
One of my first experiments was repairing the joysticks for my Atari 2600 at age 11. It didn't take long to figure out how they worked inside, and with a bit of super glue, and some electrical tape, I was fixing them whenever they broke. People gave me all of their broken Atari controllers, so I had an ample supply of them.
The second Atari experiment came one day when I decided it would be nice to be able to reset the game from my chair, rather than reaching over several feet to flick the reset switch, and getting killed before I started playing again. I ripped the machine apart, and soldered the wires from an old joystick cable onto the reset switch, and soldered the wires on the other end to a SPST switch I got from Radio Shack. I put a small elastic band around the switch, so that when it was closed, it automatically opened again. In later years I learned that you can buy momentary switches that do that automatically.. ;o)
Staying on the same theme of video game machines, my next experiment involved a portable hand-held Pac-Man game which I had gotten about a year before the Atari 2600. My parents hated the noise the damn game made, and one day my mother yelled at me "Why don't you put some headphones or a damn volume control on that thing!". Wow! What a great idea mom! Later that night, armed with soldering iron in hand, I ripped apart a radio, took out the headphone jack and volume control, taking close note of how they were wired, and then drilled some holes in Pac-Man, mounted the volume control and headphone jack in place, soldered joystick wires to all the right places, and after checking everything, nervously turned the game on to see if I destroyed it or not. Much to my surprise, both the volume control, and the headphone jack worked the first try! I put it all back together, and ran downstairs to show my parents. After ecstatically blathering about how awesome my modifications to Pac-Man were, I could see by the look on Mom's face that she was pissed that I tore apart something that expensive and messed around with it. However, before saying anything, she could plainly see that it actually worked as expected, and instead of going ballistic on me, she congratulated me on the effort.
A week or so later, I decided how cool it would be if I could use an Atari joystick on the portable pacman game. I had no frigging clue how I would go about that, but my mind was set, almost as fast as coming up with the idea. So, Pac Man went on the surgery table once again. After some deep thought, I determined I would have to manually construct a female joystick connector somehow to plug the joystick into the game. My dad had some steel wire in the garage which was about the same guage as the pins in the real Atari joystick port, so I took that and cut 9 wires of the same length. I wrapped some hockey tape over theconnector on the end of one of my joysticks, then stuck each of the wires through the tape into the joystick holes, and put a twist in the end of each wire where I'd solder some joystick wires to. Then I heated up my hot melt glue gun, and covered the whole mess with hot glue, and quickly pulled the hockey tape up off the connector to mold the glue into shape. After it all hardened, I pulled the mess off the end of the joystick, and took the hockey tape off. Voila! One homemade joystick connector! I drilled some holes in good ole Pacman, and filed it out to be roughly joystick shaped, then put the connector in place inside and hot-glued it into place. While the glue hardened, I figured out which color wire in the Atari joystick cable turned on which pin in the connector, by using a battery and a flashlight lightbulb. Then I soldered wires from the homemade joystick connector, to the directional contacts on the pac man circuit board. I put it all back together, plugged in the Atari joystick, and with fear in heart, powered on Pac Man, praying that it still worked. The game kicked into action, and as I moved the Atari joystick, pacman followed in unison. Another 11 year old mad scientist project under my belt! Once again my parents were surprised that I didn't get killed or something from my crazy experiments, but were happy to see the game still work. ;o)
I continued with similar experiments for a few years, not really knowing much about what I was doing, but experimenting and having fun nonetheless. When I turned 14 or so, my Uncle Gary seen my interest in electronics, and started teaching me some real theory. I visited Gary weekly for several years while we tinkered with various electronics projects. Each year I started spending less time with electronics however and more time with girls, and eventually I almost stopped going to Gary's. After I turned 20, most of my attention was on electric guitar and girls, and my electronics hobby sat idle for a few years. Later, I took Computer Engineering at a local college, which had an electronics component, and that rekindled my electronics hobby for 2-3 years. Electronics was an expensive hobby to maintain, as was computers and electric guitar, so my electronics hobby took a back seat since then, except for every now and then when I get sparked up.
